Interview
‘The Deeper the Roots, the Taller the Trees'
Syed Manzoorul Islam's first collection of short stories in English, The Merman's Prayer and Other Stories, will be launched at the Dhaka Hay Fest on November 14. The author himself has translated all the stories from Bangla. In this interview, he talks with Rifat Munim about the different aspects of his stories.
Syed Manzoorul Islam
How did your fiction writing career begin and how long did it take you to finish the stories compiled in your forthcoming collection?
These stories were written over the last twenty years. I started with a story in Bichitra in 1973, titled 'Bishal Mrittu'. It was a very surrealistic kind of story. A famous short story writer read it and said it didn't make any sense. Then I went to Canada to do my PhD and decided to keep it on hold. Having finished my studies, I came back in 1981. Back then Abul Hasnat, our esteemed literary editor, worked for Sangbad. He got hold of me and suggested I write on world literature. As I started my fortnightly column in the literature page of Sangbad, which grew very popular, I forgot about writing stories. But without my knowing the stories kept accumulating. Then in 1989, Afsan Chowdhury, himself a good short story writer, sort of cajoled me into writing for Bichinta. Minar Mahmud was its editor at that time. I think that was my real beginning.
In your stories we see a blending of harsh realities with magical events. Why so?
Let me start by giving you an example. There was this time when I was on board a plane from Taipei to Bangkok. The flight failed to find an air corridor due to heavy traffic so it took a tour around the Bay and at one point, the captain, who was perhaps a British man, showed up and told us the waters below were famous for mermaids and if we looked down, may be we'd be able to spot one or two. To my utter surprise, everyone looked down, me included. So every passenger on board was hoping against hope that there might be real mermaids. I played a prank saying, 'O, there it is!' and everybody exclaimed, 'Where? Where?' I said you can't see the mermaids anymore but maybe there are mermen. A lady from behind said, 'Hey! What do you mean by mermen? How does one become a merman?' I said, 'You just jump into the water, then into the hands of a mermaid and you pray that you become a merman, and that's it!' She believed me, saying 'Wow! Is that how the mermen began in history?' I said yes, it began in a prayer.
So, this is the possibility of your stories because people in real life want to believe in many things and they love those things so intimately that it doesn't matter whether they really exist or not, because all these dreams and imagination become real in the inner recesses of their mind.
Is that how you found your title story 'The Merman's Prayer and Other Stories'?
Well, there's more to it. I went to Cox's Bazar. A hotel owner told me, with firm belief, that forty years ago this place was visited by mermaids! He said terrible things occurred if anyone made them cry. One of his friends became paralyzed because he wronged a mermaid. He insisted that if I went to the beach in Teknaf, I might still meet with one or two of them! After that he went to say his prayers, just like that! That shows you that people are willing to believe things. People's dreams, beliefs, desires are not merely non-existent, may be they remain in a different world than this one we see. It won't be an exaggeration to say we all live in two worlds, which are entirely different from each other.
I believe people always have double lives. There's no man who does not have dreams, desires, longings which have hardly anything to do with reality. There's no man who does not want to be child again. And if we really shut these things out, then we deny ourselves the basic conditions of our existence. You have to be a child at times; you have to be a lover in your college life or at least once in your life, otherwise the world of beauty shuts itself out.
Tagore, one of my most favourite writers, understood this very well, the importance of this two-facedness. If you see his self-portraits you'll notice the deliberate use of black, his faces are simply dark. Why does a sage like Tagore have to portray himself as dark? In my interpretation, it is his other self he wanted to refer back to, and that other self gave validity to his sage-like self so that he could stand here taking a deep breath and say I exist for this world.
How do you think the English reading public will receive your stories?
SMA: I'm sure the English reading public will appreciate these stories because they are not stories belonging to any particular culture. Certain ideas cut across all cultures. A woman's life for example, or the desire to escape harsh reality and get lost in a world where no one can trace you – these are universal themes.
Your stories are very much rooted in Bangladesh. How do you think such localized subjects can assume universality?
The deeper the roots, the taller the trees will grow and towards the sky they will reach. If you do not have a complete sense of your culture, then you cannot really begin to assume the diversities of other cultures. The stronger your roots, the more you realise the shape of other cultures, the more you can reach out and exchange ideas. This is a very inter-connected world and always had been so. Look at Marquez' short stories. He has created this imaginary place called Macondo and invested it with all particular localness and all particular 'everydayness' but see how very quickly this localness is transcended. His stories become everybody's stories.
Secondly, my stories rely heavily on the oral tradition of storytelling. This is a tradition where stories are not bound by any particular culture; where Arabya Rajanir Uponnyas (Stories of a Thousand Night) becomes our own although it had originated in a far-off land. It means stories travel across continents and the storyteller therefore has access to the repository of images, ideas, dreams, desires, aspirations and expectations that people share. Now, if you can somehow touch these, your locality and localness is not a barrier. On the contrary, that is a benefit which allows you to move more easily across geographies.
In your stories you seem to continuously talk with readers just like a storyteller in the oral tradition does. Why?
Storytelling is a very distinct tradition from story writing. Our tradition of storytelling is a thousand years old whereas our tradition of story writing dates back to two or three hundred years. Story writing involves the love of words, cleverness of style, and the piling up of words and worlds, which I think is a very difficult task to accomplish. On the other hand, storytelling is essentially very simple, it is something which celebrates the power of creative imagination; it is not interested in intricacies of styles; it is rather interested in the relationship between the audience and the storyteller who actually remain on the same plane. Conversely, in the case of story writing, it's like you are standing on a podium and your readers are out there, sitting in front of you, and you are the giver and they are the receiver. So there is no further communication, whereas storytelling requires instant feedback from the audience. So I like to engage my readers in a way that they will be spurred to respond actively to my stories.
In the great storytelling tradition of Bengal, the supernatural and natural, the magical and the harsh realities of life – they all merge into each other. There is no hard and fast boundary between what is real and what is not. Our life is very difficult, full of miseries and loss and deprivations but we are always running after solutions and reality never offers any solution. We therefore resort to dreams and find our solutions.
While you are telling your stories, are you trying to be a story writer or a storyteller?
I try to be a storyteller. That's why I've dedicated this collection to my son because every night I had to tell him a bedtime story with a new ending which again reminds me of Arabya Rajanir Uponyas. The woman, who tricked the king in those stories, was the quintessential storyteller. She offered a new story every night. Her stories were not close-ended. They were so open-ended that they became the king's stories too. So he could not kill her. Those who died before her were the foolish ones, who put a full stop after their stories. They were the story writers and once you listen to or read their stories, they are finished. Storytelling, however, never ends. It's inter-textual, it has to be so.
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